From RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon to me dated 14/4/1997.

[This letter was typed with Sir John Hermon's home address at the top of the letter. For obvious reasons I am not including his home address.]

Dear Mrs Wright,

At the outset, I should state that I have no personal knowledge, or recollection, of the matters you raise in your letter of 2 March (and two copies, which followed it), nor did I know Detective Constable Mervyn Patterson personally.

[The above sentence contains two shocking admissions by the Chief Constable of the former RUC.
Firstly, it is absolutely incredible that a criminal affair, so serious that it necessitated a three-year investigation by officers of his own Fraud Squad, a mass of correspondence to and from his senior RUC officers and personal requests for help in this matter from an experienced Fraud Squad officer, should not have been made known to the Chief Constable.
Secondly, it is again absolutely incredible that the Chief Constable, by his own admission, did not meet with one of those Fraud Squad officers who desperately needed to meet the Chief Constable in the course of his duty with the result that Detective Constable Mervyn Patterson died of a gunshot blast to the head, no matter who pulled the trigger.]

I have spoken to ACC Forbes, who did not serve in the CID, but who has a very general recollection of the matter you raised. He was not, however, involved in any investigation concerning it, nor does he recall being given papers by Detective Constable Patterson.

[Again, the Chief Constable of the former RUC would appear to be operating in a completely different Police Force.
He states that ACC Forbes was aware of the shocking plunder of my mentally-handicapped brother's property and ACC Forbes does not seem to have told his boss. Why did the Chief Constable not do something about this shocking dereliction of duty immediately?]

If I had found your telephone number in the directory, I would have made contact to discuss how you might best proceed.

[Is the Chief Constable of the former RUC stating here that there is another way to proceed than the way I had already.
The RUC were even, over many years, advertising on television, in newspapers and elsewhere, for ordinary people to give them information of criminal activity and here I was, giving them scores of letters containing information (I had nothing to hide) about arguably the biggest fraud in Northern Ireland against one mentally-handicapped man and here was the Chief Constable implying that HE would have told ME how I should have proceeded if he had been able to contact me on the phone. He could have walked from his headquarters in Knock Road to my home in Norwood Gardens in 20 minutes or driven across the Upper Newtownards Road in far less time.]

Those matters you raised in your letter, and the implications flowing from some of them, if well-founded, are of a serious nature.

[What is this man talking about, "...if well-founded..."?
The Chief Constable had ALL the information necessary to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I was telling him and his senior officers that the matters I had raised were completely true and substantiated by his own Fraud Squad. His staff even removed confidential documents belonging to our family from my solicitor's office without our consent. I would have had no objection to this if the RUC had used this documentation to expedite a case on Freddie's behalf. The RUC however, chose to hide that documentation and prevent it being used by my own solicitor. How evil can this Police Force have been? In fact his own Fraud Squad staff were able to add loads of further evidence to what I had gathered and conveyed in writing to the RUC. The Chief Constable and his staff chose to ignore it all.]

Accordingly, I advise that, if you have not already done so, you should give all of the material in your possession to your solicitor, who will give you professional guidance and help. It is your solicitor, I suggest, who should make representations to RUC Headquarters.

[The Chief Constable should have known of the old saying, "Once bitten, twice shy". He did know that I went to many solicitors with all my information to no avail. If his officers had known that my papers were in any particular place those officers would have confiscated them.]

On a different note, if you did obtain "Holding the Line", I trust you found it interesting. In it you will be interested to refresh your memory of the tragic events through the decade of 1972/82.

[There were enough tragic events in my own life during those ten years, but the Chief Constable chose to ignore them all.]

I fully appreciate that the matters you refer to in your letter must cause you great frustration, pain and a sense of loss. I strongly recommend that you follow the advice I offer, and trust that the outcome of it all, 20 years on, will give you peace of mind and personal satisfaction.

[I have done all I can to have my case dealt with. The only people who can give me peace of mind are the members of the Police Force, now in 2005 the PSNI. Nothing has changed since the days of the RUC. There is no will in the PSNI to do its duty and pursue the reinstatement of my brother's property. The Criminal Assets people have no problem taking property off drug-dealing criminals and paramilitary criminals. Why do these same Criminal Assets people refuse to return my brother's property, stolen off him by these non-paramilitary criminals posing as solicitors and businessmen? Is a mentally-handicapped man of no consequence in the eyes of the keepers of the law in Northern Ireland?]